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[tom-martin]

I'm building a platformer/runner set during a huge earthquake.  The quake mechanic means that the platforms and obstacles appear at the last second right in front of the player.  Here's a mock up of the gameplay I'm aiming for:



It's a pretty rough mock up. There's no proper physics or collision detection going on.  The world is made up of a bunch of rectangular columns.  In the future I'd like these to be prisms with more random polygonal bases.  I've managed to create some meshes from a Voronoi diagram that tessellate and look like a more natural "cracked" landscape:



I may still use the blocky square look for some kind of temple/indoor level.

The format offers the opportunity for a randomly generated infinite runner style game.  I may experiment with this but I think for the main "story" mode of the game I'd like to create a more crafted experience.  I've no idea of the visual style I'll shoot for and creating 3D assets is hardly my strong point so I think I'll focus on the engine/game-play for now.

I figure the conceit for the crumbling world mutating in a way to support the players progress will be that they have some kind of magical flying companion capable of moving the pieces of the world (think earthbending in The Last Airbender). Of course that won't explain why some of the platforms are arranged in more difficult arrangements that others.  Perhaps the companion has limited powers? Or the player has to reach collectables (energy orbs) that replenish the companions power.

[tom-martin]

The Voronoi meshes tile in one direction so that I can reuse "slabs" rather than generating a whole lot of geometry.  Here's a gif demonstrating that:



I alternated the slab colors and made them quite small to highlight the technique.

Voronoi diagrams are generated from a field of random points.  If you duplicate the points on the y axis before generating the diagram you can take just the polygons from the middle of the field (halfway down the first and second set of points) and the resulting polygons will tile perfectly.  You could also do this on the x axis if you wanted to tile in 2 dimensions.

[ashtonmorris]

All right, I like it!  I can imagine a lot of directions this could go. Keep it up.

[tom-martin]

Thanks ashton. Will do 

I haven't been able to find as much time as I'd like to work on the game recently but I have made some progress.  I've mocked up some jump physics for the player:



This is all still very much a mock up, there's no collision with the platforms going on yet.

The jumping feels quite nice although it may be that the player can jump too far.  I guess I won't really know until I have some collision and start building some levels.

I need to make a decision about how the camera/player interaction works.  Currently the camera just stays behind the player (with a little bit of lag) and looks at them (think Crash Bandicoot).  This seems appropriate as the direction of movement is quite linear.  If I made the game a bit more open so that it could progress in two dimensions then I may want the camera to look left and right as you run left and right and then hitting forwards runs away from the camera rather than just into the world (think Psychonauts style controls.)  However I find this style makes accurate platforming difficult.

I managed to make a huge performance improvement.  I'm aiming to make a game that will run fairly well on a 5 year old laptop with a poor graphics card (my machine) and it was already chugging.  Previously all the shards/blocks in the terrain would be individual meshes that were individually translated between frames.  It made a huge difference (nearly 5x better fps) to group them into one large mesh and then modify the vertex buffers directly to achieve the movement.  Even so I imagine there are going to be trade offs between the granularity/resolution of the shards of terrain and my performance goals.  Likewise for draw distance etc.

[mirrorfish]

This looks very cool man, impressive geometry. I like this as a twist on the infinite runner genre.

I would focus more on the more temple run style platforming then the jumping around you showed in the other gif, I think the first gif you show that's a bit more linear works well. 

Maybe you could add some moments where the ground collapses out from under your feet? Might be thematically appropriate.  I think you're already off to a great start though, look forward to seeing more.